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Ask HN: Anyone building a REST API only product?

1 points by djworth ↗ HN
I have been thinking about building an REST API only product. I don't have anything specific in mind but I would prefer to build something without a UI. I end up spending hours even days sometimes on tweaking html and CSS. Not fun...

Thoughts? Is anyone else building an API only product? How is it going?

3 comments

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cperciva
Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) doesn't use a REST API (for various reasons, I built my own API), but it's essentially an API-only product. Users will (once I get the website built) be able to create accounts and check how much storage and bandwidth they're using via the website; but all the "core" work is computers talking to computers.
djworth
I thought there was a client app that did most of the data management? So, if I had I desktop application and was a user of tarsnap could I bake backups into my app?
cperciva
I thought there was a client app that did most of the data management?

Well, yes. But it's a command-line application, and all of the communication with my server is via a client-server API, not via a web browser -- maybe this isn't quite what you meant in your original question, but it certainly fits on the "without a UI" side of things.

if I had I desktop application and was a user of tarsnap could I bake backups into my app?

It would be difficult to bake tarsnap backups into your application directly, but tarsnap's command-line interface is almost exactly the same as tar's -- and I suspect that tar is one of the top 10 most commonly scripted UNIX programs. So if it would be very easy for your application to run tarsnap as a subprocess.